Great Expectations Synopsis
The novels of Charles Dickens (1812–70), with their inimitable energy and their comic, tragic and grotesque characters, are still widely read, and reworked for film and television. The first book edition of Great Expectations was published in three volumes in 1861. It is now reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection simultaneously with the serialised version, published in Dickens' periodical All the Year Round in 1860–1, and a volume of newly photographed actual-size colour images of the entire original manuscript. Dickens himself had the manuscript bound and presented to his friend Chauncy Hare Townshend, with whom he shared an interest in mesmerism and the occult, and in 1868 Townshend bequeathed his library (including the manuscript) to the Wisbech and Fenland Museum. Dickens scholars and enthusiasts will now be able easily to study this three-volume book edition alongside the serial and the work-in-progress, with all its deletions and revisions.
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About Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was born in Landport, Hampshire, during the new industrial age, which gave birth to theories of Karl Marx. Dickens's father was a clerk in the navy pay office. He was well paid but often ended in financial troubles. In 1814 Dickens moved to London, and then to Chatham, where he received some education. The schoolmaster William Giles gave special attention to Dickens, who made rapid progress. In 1824, at the age of 12, Dickens was sent to work for some months at a blacking factory, Hungerford Market, London, while his father John was in Marshalea debtor's prison. "My father and mother were quite satisfied," Dickens later recalled bitterly. "They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge." Later this period found its way to the novel LITTLE DORRITT (1855-57). John Dickens paid his £40 debt with the money he inherited from his mother; she died at the age of seventy-nine when he was still in prison.
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